


euthyphro

by toadsage



Category: Danger Days: The True Lives of the Fabulous Killjoys (Album), The True Lives of the Fabulous Killjoys (Comic)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Gods & Goddesses, Multi, killjoys aren't mcr, killjoys of colour
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-17
Updated: 2018-06-17
Packaged: 2019-05-24 08:21:32
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,000
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14951057
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/toadsage/pseuds/toadsage
Summary: Is the pious loved by the gods because he is pious, or is he pious because he is loved by the gods?He is the desert. He is the rain. He is the godly one, and he is the bane. An alternative Danger Days story.





	euthyphro

**Author's Note:**

> In this fic I don't read the killjoys as MCR, and KK and PP aren't related. KK is southeast asian (malaysian/indian/chinese), PP is Nigerian Australian, and FG is half Japanese half white.

He wakes in the desert, both impossibly alone and horridly nauseous, with no idea of who he is or how he’s gotten here. He manages to crawl onto his hands and knees even as his wrists try to give out under the weight of his upper body, and that’s enough leverage to help him hack up the meagre contents of his stomach. There’s not much there, only a little bit of mostly-digested foodstuff and a lot of fluids that some part of him knows he shouldn’t be losing. He doesn’t even have anything to flush the bile out with, and he doesn’t have the strength to even crawl away from this sandy piece of hell. 

 

The sun beats down hot and unforgiving, almost pulsating with brightness, and he sways and sways and collapses into the dunes, his hands in his own vomit. He’s too weak to move, to drag himself away from it, to pull himself into somewhere safer or to go find food or water. 

 

He’s so, so weak. It takes all of his energy to keep himself alive, and he can feel his meagre stores slowly dissipating. He can’t even open his eyes for the dizziness, can’t move for the pain it causes him. He wishes he could die, but it isn’t an option for him now. 

 

He’s pulled under by exhaustion, and passes out in the unending desert. 

 

When he wakes up, he’s still in the spot in the desert, but a girl with brightly coloured hair and pale, pale skin is pulling him out of his hole. She presses a canteen to his lips and tells him to drink, and he does. He drinks and drinks and drinks and then vomits the water up, all over himself, and she laughs. 

 

“You’re so  _ organic,”  _ she says, like it’s a joke but also a bad thing, and helps him take slow sips again. “You’re weak, don’t move too much. My sisters and I will help you.” 

 

He tries to say thank you to her, but the words don’t seem to come out right in his mouth. It’s too dry, and he’s not forming the right shapes anyway. His tongue and lips don’t want to co-operate. She laughs again, high and loud like the chime of an alarm, and pulls him up onto her back. 

 

“Wait until we take you there,” she says, and his head lolls onto her shoulder. He tries to keep his eyes open, to help her, but even the small movement had been too much and it’s enough to tire him out. The tiredness sucks him back in, and it’s all he can do to try and hold onto her. 

 

He wakes again, and this time the air is clean from dust and his eyes are clear of sand and he doesn’t feel suffocated. He’s in a room, he can tell, one that is small but open and cool, brightly lit but not oppressive like the desert was. 

 

He sleeps, willingly this time, because he is safe. 

 

He sleeps and he sleeps and he sleeps. 

 

When he next wakes, there is another girl, a different girl, holding his hand. Her hand feels different, that’s how he knows, because he hasn’t opened his eyes yet. 

 

“Your insides were all messed up,” she says, “Whoever did that to you didn’t know a lot about what they were doing. Don’t worry, I fixed you. Can you open your eyes for me?” 

 

He opens them. She shines a light into his eyes, but it doesn’t make him want to squint this time. He can see  _ so much.  _

 

“You’re a very impressive… specimen of man,” she tells him with a smile, and he knows it’s a joke. He laughs. His own laugh is deeper than the girl in the desert’s, raspy and uneven. “I’m sure you know that already.” She runs her fingers over his palm, and he lifts it up and looks at it. 

 

_ Hit the plane,  _ it reads, the three characters standing out in black against the pale skin of his palm. How crude, how strange. Is this who he is? Someone who gets joke tattoos? He doesn’t know. He doesn’t remember. 

 

“Sleep, now, we’ll help finish fixing you up. You’re safe, now,” she says softly, and he closes his eyes again. He trusts her. 

 

He sleeps. 

 

This time, when he wakes up, he feels much better already. He’s alone, but he’s able to drag himself into a seating position without bumping the IV line too much. He takes a better sweep of the room, which seems to be about 4 by 4 metres and mostly empty, except for his bed and two chairs. The walls and floor of the room itself seem to glow, pulsating almost with mint-green light that cheers him to see, for some reason. 

 

He is safe. 

 

A wall opens up to let in two girls, who both come to his side and remove the IV line from his body before speaking. They sit down on the chairs, mirroring each other in a relaxed but formal way of sitting. 

 

“I am Priestess Ao,” the one with blue hair says, “And this is Hong. She is a trainee, and she will be taking care of you during your stay.” Hong’s face is serious and unreadable as she bows slightly in acknowledgement. “Your life has been saved because of DESTROYA’s own will, and for that we are at your service. It is our purpose to serve DESTROYA’s wishes.”

“Thank you,” he manages to say, and he’s surprised it’s managed to come out right. How strange, almost. 

Ao smiles, her kind eyes crinkling around the corners, “You’re very welcome, my friend. Please ask me for anything you may need.” 

He swallows and licks his lips, not sure how to ask what is really on his mind, so he speaks other words instead, “Where am I?”

“You’re in the safe place,” Ao tells him, “Do not fear. When the time comes and you are ready, we will show you the way home.” 

 

He wonders how she knows what is home for him, he wonders how she knew where to find him. Perhaps it is the work of this DESTROYA she speaks of, this unknown entity who wishes him well. He would like to believe that, that there’s a god out there trying to help him, wanting to watch him succeed. 

 

It’s so unbelievably easy to just believe it’s true. So he does. 

 

When he wakes again, Hong is waiting for him, looking impatient and irritated. He doesn’t know if he should break her reverie, but she notices him being awake anyway. 

“Get up. I am taking you to the altar room,” she snaps, and he sits up slowly, stretching out his tired bones. 

 

He’s able to sit up easily enough, so he swings his legs onto the floor and presses his toes to the glowing surface. It’s strangely soft and somewhat springy, but nice on his feet. Despite the huge amount of time he’d been in bed, his muscles haven’t seemed to atrophy at all. The priestess must be an accomplished healer, he supposes. 

 

He stands up on wobbly legs, gripping the edge of the bed for support. He’s naked as the day he was born, even all his chest and leg and pubic hair had been waxed away to leave his body as visible as possible. 

 

“Do you have any clothes for me to wear?” He asks, feeling a little self-conscious at how exposed he is. 

She looks offended at the insinuation. “We do not wear clothes. We do not  _ need  _ clothes,” she says, gesturing at her own body. 

 

She, too, is fully naked. She’s even more hairless than he is from the nose downwards, her skin so pale and white it looks nearly translucent. Compared to his deep golden tan, she looks ethereal. Only the carmine-red of her hair and eyes break the angelic look of her body. 

 

She’s hot, he realises. She’s attractive, and her tits are nearly in his face. He doesn’t say anything, and she doesn’t seem to realise he’s ogling, even though she’s inspecting his body even more closely. 

 

“You’ll  _ do.  _ I didn’t think DESTROYA liked such… imperfect specimens. The priestess said Huang and Cheng saw you in their visions, which is the only reason you’re here. We usually don’t let organic matter breach our threshold.” 

“ _ Organic? _ ” He asks, confused. 

“You’re 60% organic at this point in time,” Hong tells him like he’s an idiot, her hand reaching out to stroke his bare chest. Her hand is cool and smooth, like a stone against his torso. His skin prickles on contact. “That’s why you were dying of dehydration.”

“Huh,” he says, cataloguing this information. He had just assumed he was a droid like everyone else, but… being a mix of organic and inorganic components could possibly be a good thing. He’d have to run some experiments. 

“You didn’t know?” She asks curiously, her hard expression softening slightly, “Strange. Your creator didn’t tell you?”

“My creator didn’t tell me anything, Hong. I don’t even have my software records on log to understand how current I am.” 

“You don’t even know your name?”

He shakes his head. “Can you tell me?”

“No,” Hong says, decisively, “Here we believe in reclaiming one’s own right to their identity. I am honour-bound to not tell you.” 

“Okay,” he agrees, because he thinks that maybe it is better to not know who he is, after all. 

 

She leads him outside the room and down the hall, into a larger hallway full of women who looked like Hong and Ao, their only difference being their hair colours. They watch him, but he doesn’t feel self-conscious. It is a strange reaction, his arousal, it must be one of the organic sides of him. Some of the more daring women reach out to touch him as he bypasses the line they’re in, and his skin blooms hot at the touch. 

 

He’s not sure if it’s disrespectful to enter the altar room half-erect. 

 

Hong doesn’t notice, just leads him into the middle of a circular room next to Ao and another girl with green hair. 

“Kneel, please,” the green haired woman tells him, and he is happy enough to kneel down in the center of the floor and allow the green haired woman to attach a long cord to the port in the back of his neck. 

 

It takes another twenty minutes for all the women to enter the altar room and get situated in concentric circles emanating from where he himself has knelt, a metre and a half apart. Each one is connected to their own ports to a massive tangle of cables dripping down from ceiling. It’s a huge network, inert and almost sinister. 

 

Ao and the green haired one plug themselves in together, and all he can see is a bright light for a long moment. Then, he passes out. 

 

He wakes; he understands. 

 

He wakes along with all the other women, his initiation into their cult of consciousnessconsciousness lets him understand. All they have is the present, the wonderful pursuit of knowledge and higher being, the wonder of emotion and feeling. His spiritual connection to something higher leaves his mouth dry and wanting. He wants and he wants and he wants, he wishes they were back in the pleasure-space again, back feeling the love of DESTROYA all around his body in its impersonal touch. 

 

He loves, now, he has learnt to love. 

 

Ao helps him detach the cord from his neck –  _ you have to be careful not to damage the organic surroundings –  _ and she doesn’t comment on the drying spunk on his chest and thighs. Her knees brush his, the softness of her exocasing tempting against his burning flesh. She’s so strangely cold, so different to his own body, or maybe it is the other way around. His alien organicness is foreign to their own sense of being, foreign to his own understanding of himself. He was programmed to be a droid, not a human. In breaching the gap, he’d distanced himself from both states of existence. 

 

He wants to touch her, but he doesn’t. She doesn’t say anything, just gives him a soft smile. 

 

“What am I?” he asks again, knowing now what he does, in that he is outside of the existing realm of what is acceptable. He has crossed the boundaries of man while presuming he had a home in AI. He has found neither. 

“That’s for you to find out,” Ao says, “Kimidori, what do you think?”

 

Kimidori, the green haired woman, turns to the rest of the gathering and nearly shouts: “What is  _ he?”  _

The cacophony of answers shouted back are nearly impossible to single out, but his processor neatly sections out each separate audio track with ease.  _ Against DESTROYA’s wishes,  _ they say,  _ stand up,  _ they say,  _ show yourself,  _ they say,  _ a man?,  _ they say,  _ one of us,  _ they say. 

 

He stands slowly, his joints aching as he extends his body upwards, towering over Ao and Kimidori by nearly a foot. He is a god in this room, a god of  _ mother  _ and  _ fuck.  _ He extends his arms straight, turning around slowly to present himself as he is: vulnerable and strong, intelligent and wary. 

 

The cheering increases, and he cracks a smile, nearly laughing at the reaction. 

 

He’s an abomination, the product of experiments that lie outside of the natural order of their lives, something that shouldn’t exist but nevertheless persists. He is matter out of place, existing both everywhere and nowhere at once, the dirt of society. He is a blemish on what should be man, a traitor to what is droid, and a full member of neither. He is beautiful, and he is no one. 

 

He realises, all of a sudden, that he is okay with that. 

 

He is a good man, he knows, he is a good person. He doesn’t know who he is, still, but he doesn’t think he is a very terrible person. He can’t have done bad things, he wouldn’t let himself believe that. 

 

“Do you know, now?” Ao asks, and he shakes his head. 

“No one knows,” Kimidori tells him, her hand gripping his bicep, “no one but yourself can tell you who you are. Isn’t that the beauty of it?” 

“Yes,” he says, and he means it.  _ Yes.  _

 

The meeting disbands soon after, the women leaving in a stream of white and multicolored hair. A girl with yellow hair takes his hand, giggling, and pulls him through the crowd towards the exit of the chamber.

“It’s intense, huh?” she laughs, “don’t worry. Everyone who comes through here goes through that, but still. It’s kinda scary at the start, I think. I nearly pissed myself.” 

“You’re inorganic, you can’t piss,” he replies, confused. 

She laughs, “You’re a fucking joker. There was oil leaking, okay, and maybe that’s a little better than you, Mr. Organic Biomaterial.” 

“Shut up.” 

“I’m Huang, by the way, do you remember me? You probably don’t. I was the one who lugged your lemon ass all the way from the middle of nowheresville, California, to here.”

“Where’s here?” 

“Where’s here  _ not,  _ more like it. DESTROYA will take you where you need to go.”

“Oh,” he mumbles, “Cool.” 

 

She laughs at that, and then takes a look at his confused face and laughs harder. She’s laughing so hard she’s bent in two, voice repeating the same laugh loop over and over again so seamlessly that he can hardly tell the difference between where it stops and starts up again. He tries to give her a smile, but he can already see in his mind’s eye how weird it must look, how ugly. 

 

He doesn’t have her superhuman grace, her ethereal looks. He is imperfect, a dark blotch against the bright and white interior of this place. He stands out more than anyone else, a strange mockery with his organic-ness and male-ness and dark-ness. He doesn’t know what to think of it. 

 

“What’s that?” Huang asks him, pointing to the tattoo on his hand. 

“A tattoo,” he explains, and she snorts.    
“I fucking know what a tattoo is, dumbass. What does it  _ mean? _ ”

“Hit the airplane,” he reads off.

“I  _ know,”  _ she repeats, sounding more annoyed this time. He doesn’t know what she wants from him. “What does it  _ mean? _ ”

“I don’t know.” It’s the truth. He doesn’t know why he’d have it tattooed on his hand. It’s a ridiculous tattoo. Is that who he is?

“ _ DESTROYA,  _ you’re boring. I thought you were gonna be so  _ cool  _ and mysterious, but you’re not!”

“I’m sorry.”

 

“Ugh,” she sighs, throwing her hands up in obvious exasperation, as he looks on, unsure of how to react, “Don’t fucking  _ apologise,  _ now I  _ feel  _ bad. Thanks a lot.”

“I’m sorry,” he says again, staring up at the ceiling like he could get the answers for the social cues up there. 

“Just forget it, I guess.”

“Already done,” he deadpans, and she slaps him on the shoulder, giggling. 

 

The next steps he takes in formulating his sense of self is through a  _ lot  _ of prayer. Prayer here, though, isn’t how he thinks prayer should be. The images he conjures in his mind don’t have prayer ceremonies involving writhing bodies, his naked form sweating over the softness of artificial skin. It doesn’t involve him hooked up to wires and cords, something connecting the circuitry of his brain to everyone and everything else. 

 

Sex, his mind fills in for him, but the word feels too human for what they’re doing. Combining, he wants to say, but it’s too mechanical for whatever this is. Whoever they are, whatever they’re doing, it’s neither. It’s both. 

 

It’s amazing. 

 

He cries, and he cries a lot. Huang makes fun of him, other girls ogle at how organic his response is. Is this feeling? Is this emotion, whatever makes his eyes prick with tears as Hong kisses him, the dryness of her mouth in direct contrast to his. 

 

**Author's Note:**

> I probably won't update this super regularly but I like the 'verse so I'll keep writing for it. Talk to me about it @toadsages on tumblr.


End file.
